5 Applications in Emerging Areas

摘要

In recent years, researchers have expanded the scope of integrated modeling to applications beyond the supply chain domain. Location planning problems arising in the health care, transportation, energy, retail and service sectors all exhibit distinctive problem characteristics that require careful modeling and analysis. Thanks to rapid recent development in modeling and optimization techniques, state-of-the-art models have been proposed and studied in various cutting edge problems. In this chapter, we provide a review of some examples of recent work in these emerging research areas. These examples cover the topics of sustainable transportation, renewable energy, retail strategy and health care, all of which are themes that have drawn considerable interest in the broader operations research/ management science community. Through this, we hope to convey the message that facility location research, despite being a traditional area of study, still has important contributions to make (as well as challenges to tackle) going forward in some of the cutting edge areas.